Posted
by
timothyon Sunday June 16, 2013 @03:15PM
from the let's-just-let-the-nsa-sort-it-out dept.

Lucas123 writes "Intel this year plans to sell a set-top box and Internet-based streaming media service that will bundle TV channels for subscribers, but cable, satellite and ISPs are likely to use every tool at their disposal to stop another IP-based competitor, according to experts. They may already be pressuring content providers to charge Intel more or not sell to it. Another scenario could be that cable and ISP providers simply favor their own streaming services with pricing models, or limit bandwidth based on where customers get their streamed content. For example, Comcast could charge more for a third-party streaming service than for its own, or it could throttle bandwidth or place caps on it to limit how much content customer receives from streaming media services as it did with BitTorrent. Meanwhile, Verizon is challenging in a D.C. circuit court the FCC's Open Internet rules that are supposed to ensure there's a level playing field."

"Some of the things in the list they are already doing. For example, Comcast does not count use of their video streaming service against your monthly cap but does count use of other streaming services."

But there *IS* a law against it, and they *ARE* in court over it. And I think it is pretty obvious that they will lose.

Uhhh...they ALREADY do that cap bullshit, have been for years. If I use THEIR VoIP? No cap, Vonage? Cap. I use THEIR PPV? No cap, netflix? Cap.

This is why i have the urge to fucking bitchslap libertarians, how the fuck can you keep babbling on about "the free market" when there is NO free market, has NEVER been a free market, and unless you wipe out ALL money and start everyone out at zero in your new system so the old money can't buy their advantages there will NEVER BE a free market, okay!

Because the smart people who mentored them in Liberalism, their college professors perhaps, told them that Libertarians aren't worth listening to or ought to be ignored and these people, being intellectually lazy themselves, decided to follow that advice instead of thinking for themselves as Libertarians are fond of doing. The Liberals claim to be tolerant and open minded and yet in my experience that's only true if you agree with them.

I do however, not enjoy hypocrisy of far right libertarians or tea partiers who want the government in my private life

It's not accurate, in my opinion, to characterize the Tea Party groups as libertarian. While it's true that some positions of the Tea Party platform lean libertarian, taxes for example, there are many other issues on which they are much closer to the neoconservatives. For example, I doubt that you would find much support within the Tea Party for ending the War on Drugs or allowing gay marriage.

It's worth it to note though, that the government had to step in precisely because the market was so fragmented that they were causing dangerous conditions with all the lines they were running without any unified standard and people generally refused to share line capabilities.

It's the classic example of natural monopoly, the regulated utility. Even most libertarian leaning people, with the

I think that your rage is misplaced. The telecom business, upon which the ISPs depend, is a natural monopoly which requires some regulation to properly align interests due to the physical impracticality of allowing competition to emerge organically in the marketplace. After all, there's only so many rights of way for digging trenches and laying fiber or setting up antennas on towers. However, a single counterexample, which amounts to a special case, does not invalidate the entire thesis of free market capit

I'm sorry I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. Show me ONE functional free market system, JUST ONE. Stock market? Nope [youtube.com]. in fact between government money, "too big to fail" and letting them put ultra high speed trading practically on the floor (usable only by the elite who can buy access of course) the stock market is probably one of the most tilted and rigged systems on the entire planet.

The libertarians might as well be talking about John Galt or a perfect utopia for how much their viewpoint has to

How about the market for crude oil? There you have a commodity that just about everyone wants and for which there are always willing buyers. You will notice that even the Iranians, who are supposed to be under economic sanction, are still able to find buyers for much of their oil, albeit at a somewhat reduced price and increased difficulty transporting it to markets. Does not oil flow almost to whomever will pay the most for it? Isn't that how markets are supposed to work, rationing based upon who will pay

The oil market is as rigged as any other thanks to futures trading and how those at the top have the ability to influence the market with HFT which Joe Average will never have access to. As for dope dealing? That is ruled by the gun, same any other illegal market, so it all comes down to who can hire the biggest goon squad, see large parts of mexico controlled by the cartels for an example. Again Paco isn't gonna rise to become a rival to the cartels just by selling his product cheaper and providing a bett

How is that the fault of the free market? Even historically it has always been difficult for technology companies to break into the content business without either owning or partnering with studios and content delivery companies. The interests of a business of a company built upon copyright are not the same as those of company whose business is technology and even when the corporate ownership structure exists to compel cooperation between technology and content units, as in the case of Sony, the cooperation

The solution to the RIAA and MPAA problem is for powerful companies such as Google to BUY member companies and use their content for their own revenue models while giving them appropriate marching orders to relax content controls.

Google alone makes far greater revenue than all RIAA members combined. Buy a few member companies, fragment the enemy and profit thereby, then press on.

That's what you get with vertically integrated companies. If you buy into one part of their "stack", they will ensure you will not go to their competitors for the remainder of the stack or try and tax you if you do, if they can get away with it. In the case of ISPs who also sell content, that's why we need net neutrality.

honestly on my end, it was in part due to the fact that I had had to immediately end a #2 ahead of schedule to take the call. On her end, my best guess is that it could betray a slight sense of non-straightforwardness that is not hidden by the fact that the complaint has remained live, and unanswered with a single sentence of explanation for 9 months now. And how it might relate to the interrellation between my complaint and it's fight to enable U.S.A. citizens to host their data on their own services on

Intel's larger problem will be that as soon as it is widely recognized by the public and the press that their set-top boxes have build in cameras and microphones their market will dry up instantly. There is already a bill in congress to put a stop to this sort of thing [slashdot.org].

It is time to allow multiple cables into a home. There is simply no excuse for allowing one company to control cable access. I am aware that technology is allowing cable to carry more and more data or content but allowing one company to set rules, speeds, limits or prices is wrong. In my home only one miserable TV channel can be had without cable. Home dish services generally do not have good reputations here. So why not have five separate cables running into a home? Many areas can support such a

Would the five separate cables be maintained in some sort of coordinated way, or would they each dig up the street whenever they felt like it?

If maintained in a coordinated way, what's the advantage of literally running five cables in the same trench, instead of running one cable but having it owned by a neutral entity, like a municipality or regulated utility, which sells access on equal terms?

>If maintained in a coordinated way, what's the advantage of literally running five cables in the same trench, instead of running one cable but having it owned by a neutral entity, like a municipality or regulated utility, which sells access on equal terms?

This!.

Allowing cable companies to own/be content providers was a huge mistake. One it will take years to overcome. ]It was a stupid mistake.

Local loop ownership by municipalities might work. but I would expect the religious wackos and budget cutters would ruin thatin short order. Something along the lines of a new Public Utility District with specific legal protections and firewalled from political entitiesis needed.

But in the mean time, pulling multiple fiber to the neighborhood (if not actually to each h

The mistake was that in a number of cases, the laying of the cabling was paid for or subsidized by the local government, with contracts written by the cable company, who got full ownership after some short service time. The towns should all be laying their own fiber to the cabinet (at least), and letting others buy access from there. But the physical monopoly, often backed by protectionist laws, is bad for the user and bad for the market.

We also shouldn't forget that providers often pay municipalities a franchise fee, conveniently billed to you the account holder, in exchange for being the "exclusive" cable provider in that area. This guarantees that even if the town did lay their own fiber to the curb, there's still not a free market for service.

There is no reason you have to pay for $50 bucks to EACH provider if you mandate cafeteria pricing of each channel.Less than a Penny per day per channel would become the norm.

But more to the point, bundling all on-demand video on top of the TCP/IP internet is probably not sustainable.A separate stream for each viewer in the household is simply more bandwidth than the internet can handle well.Do the math. You can't even handle that on the local links, let along the national backbones.

After years working in broadcast engineering on the development end I do have to say this would cause a paradigm shift. The provider of the hardware wants to enter the commercial space for television? As much as Intel would want to remain a separate entity many more operations would adapt to their practices inevitably. Rather than challenge Intel I think these telecom companies should allow Intel to offer their services and really put the customer in control. Everyone should be able to choose what they want when they pay for television and internet services it shouldn't be the provider who makes that decision for you.

In Canada, the HDTV transition has been an usability disaster. The cable boxes are simply to complex. If someone puts an easy-to-use HDTV-over-internet product together - the cable companies are dead. It might take a while, but almost anyone can put together a device with more commercial appeal than a Canadian Cable Company or Telco.

My Dad has Alzheimers and cannot remember anything. The Cable companies' HDTV remote is impossible to use. It has two different methods of adjusting volume. Powering on/off the TV takes 4 button presses. 6 different buttons can be used to change channels in various ways, and each way is inconsistent. For instance, pressing "up" will either increase or decrease the channel number depending on which up-button is pressed. With the old analog TVs, things were so much simpler: Power On, Volume Up/Down, Channel Up/Down - easy.

In comparison, an Apple TV box has a much simpler user interface. However, the main problem with Apple TV is that it won't receive cable channels. If I could purchase a set top box that simply displayed a few key channels - then it would be game over.

clear QAM = may need to use traps and traps are not very flexible to move stuff to different QAM slots. Some cable systems do put the old analog line in digital SD qam + the local HD channels in clear QAM and some systems due list the qam numbers. But that does make have less flexing in moveing stuff to make the best use of space.

Also satellite tv needed boxes for years. and direct moves channels to differnt satellites transponders quite a bit and uses at home don't have to do anything to keep viewing them.

Nobody uses multcast because it won't handle on demand viewing, and since the WHOLE POINT OF THE STORY seems lost on you, the control over local caching is EXACTLY why new entries to the market, like Intel, are essentially frozen out.

Back in 2005, I was working at Time Warner in Austin, TX. The networks were just getting upgraded segment by segment to support Switched Video technology. HDTV was just now getting rolled out for the masses that the need for more digital bandwidth was imperative. Basically, only the channels being requested per segment got transmitted. Each node (cable box) was updated to map the channel to broadcast in real-time. Essentially the technology was abstracted out from the viewer.

There are a whole series of algorithms to use multicast IP to deliver VoD, for example pyramid broadcasting [emory.edu].

No one uses multicast on the Internet because in general there is no carriage of multicast over the Internet (mainly due to security and stability concerns). But multicast IP is used for VoD within closed networks, such as inside a hotel.

Multicast handles on demand just fine. I've seen systems that would allow instant-play unicast, and a background stream collection via multicast. When the unicast catches up with multicast, the unicast stops, and the entire item is played. This saves about 50% of the bandwidth statistically, so long as a large number don't stop playing the moment the unicast catches up. There's no reason you can't stagger multiple multicast of the same thing, for more savings of unicast at the cost of using more permane

You could record on a Win7 DVR, compress to Mp4, and then feed those to the AppleTV through itunes. For my aged in-laws i gave them a Micca PMP (personal media player) and a NAS device with a USB port. I send movies to the NAS USB port with a thumbdrive in it. They pull out the drive, stick it in the PMP and their movie autoplays. Simpler then a DVD player. The last hurdle is getting CEC control so that the PMP automatically switches inputs on play.

In comparison, an Apple TV box has a much simpler user interface. However, the main problem with Apple TV is that it won't receive cable channels. If I could purchase a set top box that simply displayed a few key channels - then it would be game over.

Fortunately for them (if Canada is anything like Australia and the US), the utter stranglehold control the cable companies seem to have on all the content will ensure that they can continue to peddle their crappy wares and not have to deal with competition.

Our main cable provider here in Australia recently was able to stop iTunes [delimiter.com.au] from carrying Season 4 of Game of Thrones. They have some exclusive license to HBO content and are leveraging their weight (I assume by throwing giant bags of money at HBO) to sto

In Canada, the HDTV transition has been an usability disaster. The cable boxes are simply to complex. If someone puts an easy-to-use HDTV-over-internet product together - the cable companies are dead.

Unfortunately, unless things are quite different a few hundred miles to the north, this just won't be the case because for many of us, the cable company is also the ISP . Unless and until cellular data plans become faster and much cheaper.

It's like somebody in their boardroom thought that just making boneheaded decisions about their processors wouldn't make AMD competitive enough, so he invented a massive boondoggle that nobody has any need for.

Lots of talk about how ISPs could do this to protect their own video offerings. But are they really doing it? My current ISP is Comcast, previous was AT&T U-verse. In both cases I did not subscribe to their TV option - just to internet and voice.

I have had no problems streaming video from Netflix, Amazon or Hulu+ through my Roku box. Base bandwidth to maintain a video stream is only 5 Mbits or so, so it would seem to be increasingly difficult for ISPs competing for customers in the Mb/s battles to throttle things so much as to prevent streaming video.